Cheap Living on a Sailboat Is Fun and Smart Living
Cheap living on a sailboat is something we know about... for eight years we cruised the Caribbean...bounded in the North by the Virgin Islands, both US and British... bounded in the South by Trinidad and Venezuela... visiting all islands in between, the Windward's and Leewards.
Not only was it a lot of fun, living out the lifestyle that Jimmy Buffett sings about... It was very cheap, we have all this fun and spent around 00 a month in doing so.
How could it be that cheap?
First lets look at clothing costs...for the guys swim trunks, a T-shirt,, hat, sunglasses and flip flops. For the ladies, a swimsuit, cotton cover up,, sunglasses, and flip flops. How expensive do you think such a simple wardrobe would cost? The answer is not much...
How about rent? Occasionally, especially in Trinidad we paid around 0 a month for a slip that included electricity and fresh water...that was living high on the hog to a sailboat cruiser. About 80% of the time we were anchored, close to shore, and paid nothing. We felt especially smug when we anchored close to a fancy resort, charging 0 a night...we paid nothing, had a better view, and roamed around the resort at no charge.
How about food? When you cruise, you avoid the tourist spots...like the resorts referred to above. When having lunch, we would eat where the locals ate. These places were easy to locate, we had two rules:first, we had to be the only white people in the restaurant and second, the menu had to be on a chalk board. If we followed these two criteria, we knew it would be cheap and that the food would be fresh. Except for rare or special occasions, our breakfast, dinners and most lunches were on board, our own boat or someone else's...that's cheap folks.
How about transportation costs? We did have to buy diesel for the sailboat and gasoline for the outboard motor on our dinghy, which got us from the sailboat to the shore. The price we usually paid was about the same as you would pay at a marina in the US... Unless of course you were in Venezuela, there we paid $.37 a gallon for diesel or gas. Getting around the island we used public transportation, ranging from seven cents in Venezuela for the bus to a dollar a person for a taxi, usually a 14 passenger van, in the US Virgin Islands.
Cheap living, cheap living on a sailboat, can be a lot of fun... Who says you have to have a lot of money to enjoy yourselves?
Frugal Living - Cheap Living on a Sailboat Is Fun and Smart Living
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